City of Nets
Page 83
* Others felt a need for relief from Harry Cohn. When the Columbia boss billed Rosalind Russell for some studio gowns that she wanted to use on a tour of military bases during the war, she retaliated by charging him for the use of her fur coat in a Columbia film. As she went out the door, ostentatiously fanning herself with Cohn’s check for $2,700, Cohn shouted after her: “Jew!”
* It is also worth remembering that in the supposedly independent Hollywood of today, nobody made a movie critical of the Vietnam war until after it was all over.
* Remember that Jack Warner, in testifying before the committee, had singled out Kazan, who was then in the midst of directing Gentleman’s Agreement, as a subversive, “one of the mob.”
* This was Miss Bergman’s own account. A recent biographer, Laurence Leamer, charges, without offering much evidence, that she had actually been having a series of rather casual affairs since her first years in Hollywood. Her supposed lovers included Gary Cooper; Victor Fleming, the director; Larry Adler, the harmonica virtuoso; and various unidentified others.
* Unlike other dismissed movie producers, Schary went off and wrote a successful play, Sunrise at Campobello, about the young Roosevelt.
* Mrs. Hopper had a fondness for innuendo. After Dore Schary went to M-G-M in 1948, she observed that “the studio will be known as Metro-Goldwyn-Moscow.” Schary immediately threatened to sue both her and the Los Angeles Times for $5 million, which prompted the Times to kill the item in its later editions, and to apologize.
* Except for Dmytryk and Biberman, who happened to be brought before a more lenient judge, and who therefore received, for no particular reason, terms of only six months.
* LeRoy had overseen such workmanlike successes as Little Caesar (1931) and The Wizard of Oz (1939), but he deserves a special kind of fame as a subject of a classic pun. At an executive meeting at M-G-M, Nicholas Schenck was fretting about LeRoy’s failure to stay within his budget on The Wizard of Oz, and Mayer presented the young Joseph Mankiewicz as an experienced writer and director who could explain such things. When all the executives turned to Mankiewicz for his explanation, Mankiewicz felt some irresistible impulse to evoke Victor Hugo and blurted out. “I suppose LeRoy s’amuse.” Schenck said, “What?” Mankiewicz repeated his inspired line. Somebody said, “That’s French.” Schenck said, “Why are you talking French?” “All I could think of,” Mankiewicz said later, “was, ‘Why am I here?’ ”
* I list paperback reprints only when those are the editions that I used.